Five Red Herrings

This isn’t the greatest book that Dorothy L Sayers wrote. It’s more like a mathematics exercise actually (the kind where you’re given sixty eggs, twenty boys and $1.25 a kilo and it’s all supposed to mean something). There’s one passage which is good, where she delves into some human psychology quite successfully, but the rest is not much fun to read, which is a pity, because she’s capable of profound thought.

An artist in an artist’s colony is found dead, with a picture next to him, still wet. So an artist is the murderer. We follow where each of the artists went on the fateful morning. Lord Peter Wimsy tells us in the end who did it. He also tells us that it’s not really murder because the dead bloke wasn’t very nice. Sayers doesn’t really sidetrack, just gives us an immense amount of boring data to work the sum out with, most of it (of course) consisting of red herrings. The most annoying part is that it’s set in Scotland so she has half the characters speaking broad Scots which is both patronising and incomprehensible. None of the women come across particularly well either. The problem with Sayers is that she was a snob; her worst books reveal it, her best transcend it. This isn’t one of her best.